IT’S often said that necessity is the mother of invention. And in Rachel Jones’ case, she was the mother that needed an invention.
The shelves in the likes of Mothercare may be packed with baby chairs, but none suited Ms Jones’ baby Freya - or rather the type of adult chairs she was expected to occupy when the family went out to dine.
So the Edinburgh-based businesswoman inv
ented what she couldn’t find but needed, namely the ideal portable babychair. She even used the lining from her wedding dress to fashion the first prototype of her "Totseat". Now, a year to the day after setting out on her quest, she has what she needs. So do many of her friends. And there’s a clamour on for her "temporary" baby chair the likes of which she "could never had imagined".
"The last year’s been great, but sheer madness," says Ms Jones, who together with her husband Mike Groves runs the city-based public relations company Great Circles.
Ms Jones says the idea for her fabric baby chair - which folds into its own six-inch-long bag - was a labour of love and the result of "bitter experience". But it led to the establishment of her new business Totseat.
Ms Jones explains: "We had a young child but we still liked to go out a lot. But big bulky baby chairs are not really practical when you’re eating out. And you’ve got so many other things to carry, like nappies, creams and the like. So I wanted something that would help minimise the clobber I had to carry with me."
And she adds: "It was an accidental invention that came about through need, not because I wanted to get into manufacturing."
For one reason or another, the range of baby seats available were not a solution to the massive variety of chairs small tots would be required to sit upon in cafes and restaurants across the country.
So, working nights on her project, after a long day at the office, led Ms Jones to inventing a foldaway fabric - "washable and squashable" - baby seat that can safely accommodate a child between the ages of eight months and two years on virtually any four-legged chair to be found in the average British diner.
"I couldn’t find what I needed, so I had to make it," says Ms Jones. "Existing [baby] seats were bulky and didn’t sit on cafe chairs properly, or else the baby had to sit in a buggy on the floor."
So, stripping the lining from her wedding dress, she took it to a dressmaker friend who was married to a sheet-metal worker, and between them they fashioned a design for the Totseat. Another friend, Lucy Richards at Edinburgh-based graphic design agency StudioLR, agreed to do the branding and marketing, with the aim of promoting the product as a seat "for babies who lunch".
Twenty-three prototypes, and 900 in-situ testings by a string of friends later, finally led to the finished Totseat, which Ms Jones claims "is strong enough to withstand an adult tug of war".
Mr Groves says Totseat deliberately avoided the "teddy bears and ducks" decor that adorns so many baby products. "There are people who may not necessarily want to go to a child-friendly restaurant, but might still want to take a young child to a restaurant that’s not got proper high chairs. The Totseat is not meant to replace a high chair, but it’s so small that these places could have one tucked under a counter instead of storing a static high chair, or use it as an additional child seat if the high chairs a place has are all being used."
While the Totseat, being a non "static" item, does not need to have the type of safety standards that fixed or permanent seats need, Ms Jones says it has been independently tested by safety experts and childcare organisations and has been designed to comply with the type of strict guidelines that govern children’s clothing and toys.
"That shows we’ve done as much risk assessment as we could on the fabric, the components and the structure. The design has been tested to the highest available standard," she says.
Products used include clip units made by Japanese group YKK, the biggest supplier of zips and fasteners in the world, with the range of trimmings supplied by Caledonian Trimmings, based in Glasgow.
The Totseat’s manufacture is carried out by Rochdale textile manufacturer JH Cunliffe, which makes a number of baby-related products sold on the high street.
"When we selected the manufacturer, we needed to make sure they had equipment like X-ray scanners to make sure there were no needles or anything used in the manufacturing process left in the tot seats," explains Ms Jones. "I had been really keen to have the seat made in Scotland, but could not find anyone who inspired me enough."
She was also keen to have all the materials used easily sourced and be compliant with "fair trade" principles.
Ms Jones says the high cost of manufacturing the Totseats may mean taking the production process elsewhere in future. But she is adamant fair-trade materials will be used throughout and no non-adult labour would ever be used.
Ms Jones reckons the costs involved in setting up Totseat were about £15,000 with the legal aspects and securing patents eating up the bulk of the investment.
October saw the couple present Totseats at the annual Baby & Child Fair in Birmingham’s NEC arena, where it scooped the runner-up prize in one of the fair’s design award sections for new products. "We were thrilled to bits to land that and get recognition for a year’s effort," says Ms Jones.
But, possibly more importantly, the event exposed Totseat to a raft of baby product sellers from the UK and from across the length and breadth of Europe. "It was important to put ourselves and the product in front of these people at such a major trade show. And they were amazed when we were telling them this was basically day one."
Mr Groves adds: "I think Totseat has great potential, although it might have had cottage industry beginnings way back, we certainly don’t see it as that."
As well as through the www.totseat.com website, the couple are also looking to promote their new venture through retail outlets and possibly even wholesale through selected food outlets. Even prior to the trade fair, the level of feedback from the army of volunteer friends convinced Ms Jones of the merits of her project. Potentially, the market for Totseat is every baby born, which in the UK is about 650,000 a year at present. But there’s Europe and elsewhere to also take into account, as well as a possible raft of outlets using them in-house.
But the couple are not planning to run before they can walk and have targeted a mere five per cent of the UK birthrate to begin with.
And, at a sale price of £30, that makes for a theoretical turnover just shy of £1m. Mr Groves says: "The business plan doesn’t extend to Europe yet - we didn’t expect so much interest from there so soon."
He also says Totseats has already attracted the attention of a couple of "major" retailers, with talks under way to stock the seats in their outlets. A number of selected independent outlets are also being looked at as potential distributors.
"Word of mouth has sold everything we’ve been able to supply so far," adds Ms Jones. And that’s before the actual public launch of the Totseat, set for December 6.
Business sitting on a gold mine?RACHEL JONES always knew her baby seat idea was a good one - her thinking being that if she was in need of a better portable baby chair, then thousands of others parents might also appreciate it.
"The baby industry is stuffed with mothers like me who are looking to make life easier in parenthood," she says.
Having created and patented her Totseat, but while still tinkering with the final designs, a routine visit from the bank manager to her Great Circles business prompted her and husband Mike Groves to turbocharge the rollout. "He came in, saw one of the seats, asked a bit about it and told us we should really be getting it out there and on the market," recalls Ms Jones. As well as being entirely functional, the Totseat also carries an element of contemporary fashion about its design.
Ms Jones says that, in keeping with that sentiment, new Totseat designs will appear seasonally.
Originally, the baby chair business was going to operate under the name of "Arthur’s Seat", named after the fabric mannequin used as an early test model.
But Ms Jones says: "It was a name that was lost on anyone who wasn’t familiar with Edinburgh, so as an idea it didn’t last long."
